Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for Medicare For All is well documented, but what few realize is the steps she and President Biden have already taken to enact the policy over the past few years. Mark my words: as president, Harris will accelerate efforts to get to Medicare For All.
We all know that while Harris served in the Senate, she co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare For All” legislation, which would set up a single-payer system in the USA and cost the taxpayers upwards of $44 trillion. Harris is also on record in favor of abolishing private health insurance and supporting taxpayer funded healthcare coverage for illegal immigrants.
But what many don’t know is the lengths to which Biden and Harris have already gone, behind the scenes, to chip away at private health insurance, paving the way for national, government-run healthcare.
The clearest step towards Medicare For All came when the Biden-Harris administration made their second funding cut to the extremely popular Medicare Advantage program, a public-private partnership that offers some 33 million seniors robust healthcare coverage for doctors visits, dental, vision, and even gym memberships. In fact, the majority of seniors access their Medicare benefits through Medicare Advantage. And nine out of ten enrollees are satisfied with their coverage and would recommend it to friends and family.
So, why did they make cuts to this program? They want to push seniors to choose original, government-run Medicare plans as a step towards their ultimate goal – Medicare For All. And Democrats have said as much.
One of the first prominent Democrats to endorse Harris for president, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, led a coalition of 59 progressive House Democrats in a letter to President Biden, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure arguing for “strengthening Traditional Medicare” and redirecting funds “incorrectly going to MA.” Jayapal is also the modern architect of Medicare For All. Former Obama CMS Administrator Don Berwick said in February that “I would like to see Medicare Advantage slowed or stopped.” He’s also written extensively promoting Medicare For All.
In another step toward nationalized healthcare, Biden-Harris also put the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in charge of drug pricing negotiations giving federal bureaucrats more control.
The irony is that there is already a private market entity that negotiates drug prices with drug makers and manages pharmacy costs. These private market actors, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, save the average patient $1,040 on drugs per year and save payers and patients upwards of 50 percent on medical expenses. Harris is creating a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in order to kneecap the private market to achieve Medicare For All.
Last week, Biden-Harris released a statement claiming the government negotiated lower prices for 10 medications, but in fact, the private market already secures similar discounts on all of the drugs listed.
No wonder drug makers are shrugging off government drug price negotiations to their investors, with one executive saying their growth forecast “still looks very good to us.”
All this begs the question: Why put the government in charge of negotiating drugs in the first place, if they’re not serious about driving actual discounts? The answer is simple: control.
A third and final step Biden-Harris has taken toward Medicare For All that no one is talking about is a new Medicaid rule that increases the amount state Medicaid plans can reimburse hospitals from Medicare rates to “average commercial rates.” If that benchmark sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s eerily similar to state public option benchmarks, and you might wonder if the underlying policy goal is to continue expanding Medicaid so that it becomes a public option—which most people recognize is the first step toward Medicare For All.
Rhetorically, Harris is backing away from her support for Medicare For All because she knows it isn’t politically popular. Yet Biden and Harris have already made more people reliant on government healthcare for seniors, for medications, and for hospital care. A President Harris will surely only speed up this trajectory.
Ann Marie Buerkle is a former nurse and congresswoman who served as the commissioner and acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Follow her on X at @annmbuerkle.